Epilog: Netscape Embraces the Bazaar

It's a strange feeling to realize you're helping make history....

On January 22 1998, approximately seven months after I first
published The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
Netscape Communications, Inc. announced plans to give
away the source for Netscape Communicator. I had had no clue
this was going to happen before the day of the announcement.

Eric Hahn, executive vice president and chief technology officer at
Netscape, emailed me shortly afterwards as follows: ``On behalf of
everyone at Netscape, I want to thank you for helping us get to this
point in the first place. Your thinking and writings were fundamental
inspirations to our decision.''

The following week I flew out to Silicon Valley at Netscape's
invitation for a day-long strategy conference (on 4 Feb 1998) with
some of their top executives and technical people. We designed
Netscape's source-release strategy and license together.

A few days later I wrote the following:

Netscape is about to provide us with a large-scale, real-world test of
the bazaar model in the commercial world. The open-source culture
now faces a danger; if Netscape's execution doesn't work, the
open-source concept may be so discredited that the commercial world
won't touch it again for another decade.

On the other hand, this is also a spectacular opportunity. Initial
reaction to the move on Wall Street and elsewhere has been cautiously
positive. We're being given a chance to prove ourselves, too. If
Netscape regains substantial market share through this move, it just
may set off a long-overdue revolution in the software industry.

The next year should be a very instructive and interesting
time.

And indeed it was. As I write in mid-2000, the development of
what was later named Mozilla has been only a qualified success. It
achieved Netscape's original goal, which was to deny Microsoft a
monopoly lock on the browser market. It has also achieved some
dramatic successes (notably the release of the next-generation Gecko
rendering engine).

However, it has not yet garnered the massive development effort from
outside Netscape that the Mozilla founders had originally hoped for.
The problem here seems to be that for a long time the Mozilla
distribution actually broke one of the basic rules of the bazaar
model; it didn't ship with something potential contributors could easily
run and see working. (Until more than a year after release, building
Mozilla from source required a license for the proprietary Motif
library.)

Most negatively (from the point of view of the outside world)
the Mozilla group didn't ship a production-quality browser for two and
a half years after the project launch—and
in 1999 one of the project's principals caused a bit of a sensation by
resigning, complaining of poor management and missed opportunities.
``Open source,'' he correctly observed, ``is not magic pixie
dust.''

And indeed it is not. The long-term prognosis for Mozilla looks
dramatically better now (in November 2000) than it did at the time of
Jamie Zawinski's resignation letter—in the last few weeks the
nightly releases have finally passed the critical threshold to
production usability. But Jamie was right to point out that going
open will not necessarily save an existing project that suffers from
ill-defined goals or spaghetti code or any of the software
engineering's other chronic ills. Mozilla has managed to provide an
example simultaneously of how open source can succeed and how it could
fail.

In the mean time, however, the open-source idea has scored
successes and found backers elsewhere. Since the Netscape release
we've seen a tremendous explosion of interest in the open-source
development model, a trend both driven by and driving the continuing
success of the Linux operating system. The trend Mozilla touched off
is continuing at an accelerating rate.